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McDonald's
Corp., Oakbrook, Illinois, one of largest meat buyers in
the world, will continue to encourage the U.S. meat industry
to develop a practical, effective animal identification
and traceback system, John Hayes, senior director of U.S.
food and packaging for the fast-food giant, told an industry
audience last Friday. “We think animal identification is
a core competency the industry has to develop,” he stated.
Speaking
at the Meat Industry Research Conference in Nashville, Tenn.,
Hayes, referring to devastating livestock diseases such
as bovine spongiform encephelopathy and foot-and-mouth disease,
said that “a lone animal could bring the industry to its
knees if we're not prepared to deal with it.”
Earlier
this year, McDonald's announced that by the end of this
year it wanted to be able to trace back, within 48 hours,
10 percent of the meat it buys in North America. “We have
already exceeded that,” Hayes told the conference. He declined
to give a percentage goal for 2005, but added “that it will
be aggressive.“ McDonald's has a “global goal” of 100-percent
tracebility, but Hayes said the company isn't ready to announce
a target date for the goal.
While
McDonald's is the only fast-food company “to set a goal
of tracing all the ground beef we serve back to the animals
it came from,” Hayes said the present McDonald's identification
program does not trace back the animal origins of every
meat patty the company sells. It does trace meat patties
from its restaurants back to patty suppliers, and at that
point trace back is made by lot number. “We can find out
here's where the animals for that lot came from,” Hayes
said. The company pays its patty processors a premium for
traceable meat, “and we also make sure some of those dollars
go back to the feedlot and the rancher.” He added that McDonald's
does not plan to pay the premium “forever”, because “at
some point this has to become a routine cost of doing business.”
“At
the end of the day, this is what the consumer expects of
us,“ he said. “If industry influences change by paying for
it, it becomes easier to implement.” He said McDonald's
admires the pro-identification position the American Meat
Institute, which was holding its annual convention in Nashville,
Tennessee, concurrently with the research conference, has
taken.
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